The language and understanding of emotions are foreign to many who are trained in logic and objectivity. I address topics that would have helped me if I had understood them earlier in my life. I hope to demystify this language by putting it into a context, words, and displays that an engineer would understand. I hope the reader will gain insights that have a positive impact on his or her life.

30 July 2009

Addiction Visually

Everybody learns things differently. Some from pictures, some form reading, some from hearing things.

This video struck me as a pretty visually amazing portrayal of addiction. The guy is the addiction, the girl is the addict.

By the way, speaking of learning things, I inadvertently posted this from YouTube. Oops.

4 comments:

Hi there. I see you noticed Lyle Mcdonald's post about energy balance too. I thought it was pretty well written and thought out, but was turned off by his arrogance and irritation with every idiot who might agree or disagree with him. It's funny too in light of the lecture posted on Theory to Practice by Dr. Lustig which you might have seen. He points out how biochemically, a calorie of fructose is not the same as a calorie of glucose because the fructose is destined to become part of a VLDL particle, and has essentially no other outcome than to become fat.

Lyle certainly comes across as abrasive and arrogant. I think he gets impatient with all the people making the same arguments that are not supported by research. Perhaps he forgets that they are in fat a series of different people, not the same person aruing the same thing...

I did see the Lustig lecture. It is really good. It has more of a health focus though than most of Lyle's work. Lustig doesn't argue against the calorie balance equation, but he does make the case that "gluttony and sloth" are not the main drivers. Rather, the biochemistry is the driver, and we simply respond to those signals.

Fructose drives the signals differently than glucose. I doubt that Lyle would argue with any of that. Lyle would say though that if you restrict calories such that you are eating less than you are using, your body would use that fructose/fat as fuel.

Restricting calories when your body sends you different signals is the problem though from a public health/health standpoint.

I do not know what Lyle's position might be on public health impacts of different macronutrients.

Here are the links for anyone who hasn't seen the references.Lyle McDonald

Actually the video was posted on the Theory to Practice blog, not Lyle's. The real problem is that people are often unable to eat less than they use, for social and psychological and habitual reasons as well as biological ones. I just read a woman's account of eating 1000 calories a day while training for triathlons and not losing weight (and not having energy either). She was diagnosed with hypothyroidism, which explains much of the problem. So clearly energy out is decreased because of the hypothyroidism, to a point anyway. If you're running and biking lots of miles a week and carting 175 lbs around (that's her weight) it seems unlikely that the energy expenditure can be all that low. I guess it at least argues that in "normal" people, maybe there is still a lot of wasted energy that can be used by those who are severely conserving energy. People have speculated about brown adipose tissue for example but this was scoffed at, until recently when research shows that it really is active in adults, and presumably contributes to the energy balance as well. It's just that so much of energy use is not under conscious control, but instead by hormones and chemical pathways- if you don't have your metabolism in good condition, it doesn't matter how much you consciously try to control your energy inputs and outputs. Anyway, maybe we'll post something on this at some point instead of just rambling in your comments...